In the art of cultivation, time is the one thing that separates us from beings like soul beasts and earthborn. Whereas we humans can begin almost as soon as we are born (and have partaken of a Seed), it takes even the fastest animal at least one hundred years to enter the first ranks of cultivation. However, this speed is often sacrificed in exchange for experience and some would argue power. Age, after all, comes with a strength of its own, and even the lowliest soul beast is older than most humans. For all our forays into the nature of magic and our own abilities, little of it has been directed towards the study of the methods of cultivation of soul beasts and their like. Even now, we do not yet know or understand what determines the affinity or characteristics an animal will express upon evolution. Speech is a common, but not guaranteed attribute to gain, but then it is seldom used by even the most human-like soul beast.

Is it a spark, inherent in the soul, that decides upon the replacement of fur with scales and a snake-like head when a feline becomes a cobra-cat as it advances to Adept? Or is it perhaps, as we widely believe, a lower beastspirit fusing with the animal to become something more?

What of trees and mountains, some of them so old they’ve developed consciousnesses wiser and stronger than even the greatest Sages? And how is it that soul beasts and earthborn often skip ranks when they evolve, leaping from unbonded straight to Practitioner or even Ordained?

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Perhaps Oke Osisi, the Forest in One; Ada Eke, Sister Python and Ugwu Ka Ugwu, Mother of Mountains, all of them the oldest Monarch-tier Powers in the world, know. But the first has not spoken to anyone but the Sovereign of Red in thousands of years, Sister Python possesses a disdain for humanity that her lesser siblings share and the Mother of Mountains makes her home at the very top of the First Peak of the Eyrie, where only the Timelord Saint and Paragon of the First Star Sect may safely tread. But if they know, it is not a secret they have deigned to share with others.

Another option is the insect winged, blue-skinned mountain folk of the Spine and the inner areas of Amosis. Though a widely ridiculed belief, Sages and higher are convinced that they are beings from another world far different from our own. They may possess secret knowledge or skills that will shed light on this issue once and for all.

Sadly, the mountain folk are more averse to contact than even Sister Python and attempts to reach them have historically failed, with greeting parties failing to find even a trace of villages that scouts swore were there days ago.

And so the mysteries of the world go unanswered, much to the continued dismay of scholars like myself.

— Chapter 151: Theories and Speculations; paragraphs 19—26, The Last Testament of Omaliko Dike.